PHOENIX — The Washington, D.C., swamp is in a trap of its own making, giving cage-rattling reformers a key advantage against the gnarly gators who’d prefer to keep snoozing in the corruption while the public demands action to save the United States.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was speaking both generally against the swamp critters and specifically against Sen. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) at a rally in suburban Scottsdale on October 17 when Bannon denounced the elite’s rejection of voters, saying, “They hold you in total and complete contempt. They think you’re a group of morons.” (See last week’s Wanderer, p. 1.)
Elite politicians’ own arrogance and duplicity handed voters a rod to beat them with.
Exactly a week later, shaky one-term senator Flake announced on October 24 that he wouldn’t run to retain his seat in 2018. Flake insisted he was a true conservative, and both he and his many media cheerleaders had trouble acknowledging why he actually was so weak in a generally conservative state.
It was quiet when I dropped in to Flake’s office near my Phoenix home the morning of October 25. I asked the man behind the protective glass if there’d been any camera crews around. No, he said.
They had, however, surrounded him the previous day in Washington.
In a self-pitying Senate speech revealing his decision, Flake essentially portrayed himself as a model of moral magnificence, aghast at the raw evils of the Trump era.
Regretting “the coarseness of our leadership” and “the compromise of our moral authority,” Flake said, “It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.”
He denounced “the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals” and “the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons,” that betray “the people that we have all been elected to serve.”
Flake needed to look in the mirror but threw stones at others instead.
Except for Flake and his worshippers, politically conscious Arizonans remember how he ran for that Senate seat, which he narrowly won, in 2012.
His previous reputation while serving as a congressman was in favor of open borders, but, coveting the Senate spot, Flake announced he’d had a major conversion from his “dead end” stand.
Following up, he sent out a big, glossy, full-color mailer measuring 11 by 17 inches, headlined, “Jeff Flake: A tough, proven record on immigration.” (I still have a copy right here on my desk.)
With appropriate photos of sheriffs, border agents, and a long border barrier, the mailer proclaimed, “Build the fence. Secure our Border,” and, “No to Sanctuary Cities. Yes to Deportations.”
Highlighted in yellow for emphasis, a statement with Flake’s own signature at the bottom said the situation “calls for an exclusive focus on border security. Comprehensive immigration reform is a dead end. We must have a secure border” — then, without the emphatic yellow, the sentence concluded — “before addressing additional immigration reform.”
Just a few months later, in April 2013, new Sen. Flake was one of eight senators to announce their “Gang of Eight” bill for — yesss — “comprehensive immigration reform.” Flake had lied about his conversion to get elected, then quickly reverted to form.
On a different issue, back on November 11, 2013, LifeSiteNews.com reported that both Flake and his Arizona GOP teammate Sen. John McCain voted for the transgender “rights” ENDA bill after telling the conservative Center for Arizona Policy for its questionnaires that they opposed the idea.
Arizona was the only state to have two Republican senators both of whom voted for the sexual radicals’ ENDA bill, LifeSiteNews.com said.
Not to rehash the past, but Flake’s and McCain’s records of serious deception disprove their current pontifications that President Trump somehow brought unbearable dishonesty to their Washington world.
In his 2010 Senate re-election race, McCain’s advertising growled to “complete the danged fence,” then he promptly dropped that pose upon victory. In 2016 McCain insisted to voters that he was a leader to dump Obamacare. Once re-elected, he shocked the Senate by saying what he really wants is “bipartisan” reform of Obamacare along with Democrats — meaning Obamacare stays in place.
Also in his 2016 race, McCain’s team smeared conservative primary-election foe Kelli Ward with the false accusation that she promoted “chemtrails” conspiracies — a phony charge rejected even by the liberal Washington Post and PolitiFact.
Bannon had plenty of justification for telling restive voters in October 2017 that the elite “hold you in total and complete contempt. They think you’re a group of morons.”
Including the morally magnificent Jeff Flake’s contemptuous attitude to voters who won’t tolerate him any longer.
The Flake-loving, leftish Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily newspaper, reported on October 25 that Flake told it he wasn’t willing to take a path that “I can’t in good conscience take” because he’d have to “believe in positions I don’t hold on such issues as trade and immigration, and it would require me to condone behavior that I cannot condone.”
Considering his record of deceiving voters, Flake must know they don’t accept his claims to a sparkling conscience now suffering under the baleful Trump. Hmm, Trump is destroying the nation, but Flake is so offended that he retires from the field?
The Republic was quick to edit the facts to vouch for Flake’s purity in its news story, falsely claiming, “Throughout his 17-year political career, Flake has championed comprehensive immigration reform.” Did the paper already forget the 2012 immigration switcheroo?
The morning of October 25, Hugh Hewitt, a self-described “center-right” national radio talk host, not a tough conservative, expressed his irritation with “these Senate prima donnas” and their broken congressional chamber. This is why Trump was elected president, Hewitt said — Washington wasn’t doing its job.
Interviewing a different senator, liberal Chris Coons (D., Del.), Hewitt said, “And I think a lot of Americans are just disgusted with your institution, senator. I think they think the Senate is the source of all paralysis, and I’m not a Bannonite, right? I’m kind of a center-right guy. But I do think the Senate’s broken.”
Hewitt noted that anti-Trump Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) was so busy tweeting that Trump is leading the U.S. to World War III that Corker, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, failed to get a long list of Trump’s selections to be ambassadors confirmed.
“And I’ve been really hitting on the chairman,” Hewitt said, “because that’s not the way you act if you’re really worried about World War III. You get people into their posts.”
The Senate seat that Flake won in 2012 had opened up with the surprise retirement of powerful incumbent Republican Jon Kyl, who was viewed as safe for re-election.
Flake was known to be eager for the seat if it became available, but Arizona GOP Cong. Trent Franks said he was thinking of running for that spot, too. However, after a few weeks Franks removed himself from contention.
The reasons Franks gave for backing off, like wanting to spend time with his family, wouldn’t have been any different a few weeks earlier, and Arizonans were left to speculate whether Arizona powerbrokers had waved their magic wands to discourage Franks.
Interestingly, as soon as Flake announced he wouldn’t run for a second Senate term, Franks released a generous statement on October 24 saying: “In spite of our sometimes stark political differences, I consider Sen. Jeff Flake a truly decent human being and a man who loves God, his country, and his fellow human beings. I wish him and his family the very best God can give them during his remaining time in the Senate and going forward in life.”

A Bad Job

Soon after losing to McCain in the 2016 GOP primary, former State Sen. Kelli Ward declared she was in the race against Flake. Ward surged in early polls when she was seen as the anti-Flake. It remains to be seen how she holds up when some other candidate now may enter the race for the August 2018 GOP primary.
The Wanderer asked a few Arizona figures for how they think Flake’s withdrawal affects the contest.
Rob Haney, retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party and a longtime foe of Flake and McCain, said:
“I cannot imagine that Sen. Flake decided to withdraw of his own volition. I believe it is more likely the establishment powerbrokers helped Flake read the political tea leaves. They would have sadly informed Flake that he had cooked his own goose with his Trump-bashing, and that they needed a less tarnished representative to carry the McCain flag against Kelli Ward in the primary.
“State Treasurer Jeff DeWit has strong ties to Trump and so would be a less likely candidate to represent the liberal McCain faction,” Haney said. “And former (Arizona) GOP Chairman Robert Graham is so widely recognized as an over-the-top McCain operative that he has become a pariah to the Republican base, although DeWit backed him strongly for RNC chairman, which in turn gives me a concern about a DeWit candidacy,” Haney said.
“Jay Heiler is being pushed by former Gov. Jan Brewer, an unabashed McCain supporter. Heiler has worked in the establishment bureaucracy for decades and would be a strong McCain representative if he had better name recognition. If the GOP elites can’t find a better sacrificial lamb for Ward, they just might settle on announced far-left Democrat U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema as their default candidate to defeat Ward,” he said.
When Flake’s re-election weakness became apparent, Sinema announced she was running for the Democratic nomination for his seat.
“It would not be the first time they preferred a liberal Democrat over a true conservative,” Haney said. “In 2002, they formed a PAC called Republicans for Janet to elect their pro-abortion, liberal Democrat choice for governor (Janet Napolitano) over pro-life conservative U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon.”
Attorney and political activist John Jakubczyk said Flake is “frustrated with the state of Congress and probably also frustrated with the administration….He probably doesn’t like having to deal with a race” where Ward isn’t “the typical candidate.”
Also, Jakubczyk said, people were upset with Flake “disagreeing with a lot of things Trump has said.”
GOP campaign consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer: “I opined publicly back in September that Flake needed to get out of the race and, while I’m quite certain he didn’t consider or take my advice, it is clear that he and his campaign team saw the same things the rest of us were seeing. He could not win the GOP primary. So he was right to retire.”
Asked if it seemed weak that Flake wouldn’t even run in the primary, Querard replied, “I don’t think ‘weak’ is a fair word for it. But it is the first time that Flake has admitted that he has done a bad job of representing the values of the Republican Party the way he promised to.”
Q. Previously I read that Jeff DeWit wouldn’t get into the primary race and split the results. Do you think that changes with Flake’s exit?
A. It is possible that someone who said no previously suddenly says yes now. But we would have to ask why they took a pass on a race where they could have had the president’s endorsement and probably $10 million to $15 million in support, then changed their minds once those incentives were likely removed. DeWit is a special case because I think he would have the president’s support even without Flake in the race, but he has been the most reluctant to run, so it would be a surprise to see him get into the race. . . .
Q. Do you think Flake’s tone announcing his departure sounded excessively moralistic? If Trump is so awful, Flake cedes the field to him?
At this point Querard referred The Wanderer to an October 24 post by pundit Ben Shapiro at The Daily Wire saying that Trump didn’t destroy Flake, Flake destroyed himself by adopting a number of liberal positions.
Q. I see the Senate Leadership Fund says Ward still won’t be the nominee. What do you think SLF has in mind to win?
A. I have no idea who SLF has in mind, but this is a group that claims their mission is to protect the GOP majority in the Senate, yet they have abandoned Roy Moore, the GOP nominee in Alabama, so I’d be wary of their ultimate choice.
Q. Do you think the Arizona Republic and establishment are primed to ram Sinema into that seat now?
A. I think Sinema’s path to victory just got a lot more complicated. She got in planning on Flake or Ward and now it’s very likely it won’t be either. That’s not good for Sinema or her backers.

Vatican City, Feb 17, 2018 / 05:10 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Saturday the Vatican announced that Pope Francis has reconfirmed Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston as head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, also reconfirming seven members…Continue Reading

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In response to the Trump administration’s 2019 federal budget proposal on Monday, the U.S. Catholic bishops are urging for a budget that shows greater concern for “‘the least of these” and warning that the U.S. “must never seek…Continue Reading

A Connecticut high school student may have to decide whether to remove a Planned Parenthood sticker on her laptop or leave her Catholic school after administrators told her to remove it, her parents said. Sophomore Kate Murray’s parents told the Greenwich Time that…Continue Reading

February 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts should be taken in “context” with Biblical times, Jesuit Father James Martin toldGeorgetown University students recently. Martin said as well that Catholics who support gay “marriage” should have no problem…Continue Reading

JACKSON, Mississippi, February 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A bill banning abortion on babies more than 15 weeks old passed the Mississippi state House today 79-31. House Bill 1510 would make Mississippi the state with the most pro-life laws if it…Continue Reading

Just three Democrats in the U.S. Senate supported a bill on Monday that would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks when unborn babies are capable of feeling pain. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which has strong public support from Republicans…Continue Reading

ROME, January 30, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – In an exclusive interview two weeks after issuing a profession of immutable truths about sacramental marriage, Bishop Athanasius Schneider is inviting his brother bishops around the world to join in raising a common voice…Continue Reading

As Katholisch.de, the official website of the German bishops, reports today, Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Dutch cardinal and Metropolitan Archbishop of Utrecht, requested that Pope Francis bring light into the confusion concerning the question as to how to deal with…Continue Reading

When Selena Miller, a practicing Catholic, applied to DePaul, she had no idea it was a Catholic university. Damita Meneves, another practicing Catholic, said she has met only one other Catholic student in her first year at DePaul. DePaul is…Continue Reading

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By DON FIER (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Founder of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., graciously took time out of his busy schedule to grant The Wanderer a wide-ranging interview during a recent visit to the Shrine. Included among the topics…Continue Reading

By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke delivered the address below at the 32nd Annual Church Teaches Forum, “The Message of Fatima: Peace for the World,” Galt House, Louisville, Ky., July 22, 2017. The address is reprinted here with the kind permission of Cardinal Burke. All rights reserved. This is part one of the…Continue Reading

Catechism

Today . . .

There’s nothing, it seems, that the abortion chain Planned Parenthood won’t sue over. On Thursday, affiliates of the abortion chain in seven states sued the Trump administration for cutting funding for their questionable teen pregnancy prevention programs. The Daily Nonpareil reports the lawsuits argue that the Trump administration wrongly cut their funding prematurely and without cause. Nine groups, including Planned Parenthood affiliates in Washington, Iowa, North Carolina, South C

CAMBRIDGE, England, February 15, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A respected Catholic historian and philosopher challenged Cardinal Blase Cupich during a lecture last week about Pope’ Francis so-called “revolution of mercy” that has caused what many are defending as a “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice. Professor John Rist, after listening to a February 9 lecture at Cambridge Universityin which Cardinal Cupich praised Pope Francis’ “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice, asked the Cardinal at the end of the lect

VIENNA, Austria, February 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Austria’s bishops, led by Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, are indignant over a retired bishop’s passionate defense of Catholic teaching in opposing Church “blessings” for homosexual unions. After Bishop Andreas Laun, the retired Auxiliary Bishop of Salzburg, Austria, published Monday his strong rebuke of the German bishops for proposing to bless homosexual couples, there has been an inten

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago is all for clarity. It has been a consistent theme, as when in September of 2017 he issued a decree banning guns in all parishes, schools and other facilities across the archdiocese “so there would be absolute clarity on our position.” His official statement put “clarity” in italics. When he was bishop of Rapid City, he called for “civility and clarity” in discussing legislation that would limit abortion, but he…Continue Reading

BEIJING — A group of influential Catholics published an open letter Monday express their shock and disappointment at report that the Vatican could soon reach a deal with the Chinese government, warning that it could create a schism in the church in China. The Holy See has been in negotiations for several years with the Chinese Communist Party and is now belie

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Within a week of taking office on January 23, 2017, President Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, now called the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, which bans U.S. funding for abortions overseas. The expanded policy prohibits $9 billion in U.S. taxpayer money from funding foreign organizations that perform or…Continue Reading

By HANNAH BROCKHAUS VATICAN CITY (CNA/EWTN News) — The Congregation for the Causes of Saints has approved the second miracle needed for the canonization of Blessed Pope Paul VI, allowing his canonization to take place, possibly later this year. According to Vatican Insider, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved the miracle by a…Continue Reading

By STEPHEN M. KRASON (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly] in Crisis. He is professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also cofounder and president of…Continue Reading

By LISA BOURNE (Editor’s Note: LifeSiteNews ran this story on February 5.) + + + A Catholic priest is calling on bishops to excommunicate the 14 Catholic-identifying U.S. senators who voted two weeks ago against banning late-term abortions. He is also calling on priests to deny the Catholic pro-abortion senators Holy Communion. “Today is the…Continue Reading

By JAMES LIKOUDIS The centuries-old theological debate concerning the existence of Limbo for unbaptized babies (the limbo puerorum as a state of natural happiness) led to the 2007 publication of the document The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized by the International Theological Commission (ITC). The commission concluded there are “serious…Continue Reading

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Our Catholic Faith (Section B of print edition)

By DON FIER For a variety of reasons (a defect of consent, a diriment impediment, or a defect of the required form), many supposed modern-day marriages entered into by Catholic persons are invalid from their origin in the eyes of God and the Church. However, as we saw last week, depending on the circumstances, the Church has procedures by which…Continue Reading

Q. Concerning what our Blessed Mother said in Fatima about the rosary, I am confused as to whether or not she meant us to meditate on the mysteries while we are praying the Hail Marys or whether she meant us to meditate on the mysteries right before we say the Hail Marys. The consensus seems to be that we are…Continue Reading

By FR. ROBERT ALTIER Second Sunday Of Lent Readings: Gen. 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18 Romans 8:31b-34 Mark 9:2-10 In the first reading today we hear about Abraham’s nearly incomprehensible act of faith and love for God shown in his willingness to sacrifice his own son. We have to be careful not to read this in a vacuum. This test, which…Continue Reading

By ANDREA GAGLIARDUCCI (Wanderer Editor’s Note: Catholic News Agency on February 3 published a commentary concerning a 1989 Vatican response to dissent against Humanae Vitae. Below is an excerpted version of that commentary. Following that, we reprint the full text of the 1989 Vatican response, which, as the CNA commentary explains, is now available on the Vatican’s website. Please also…Continue Reading

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK A joke sometimes recounted among clergy goes along these lines: Someone greets a wise old priest by asking, “What’s new?”, and he responds, sagely, “Christ is risen!” The humor here is less about what’s new than about the fact that everything, other than the only true revolution of Christ’s Incarnation and triumph over death, is…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN Great sinners make great saints. It takes a strong-willed child to become a saint. These are statements which would easily fit saints such as Mary Magdalene and St. Augustine. In the thirteenth century, a young lady free in spirit and strong in will led such a life that she was essentially driven from her home village, but…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN In the lives of the saints one thing is very common: They have such a strong desire to do God’s will that nothing will hinder their work. Many saints, despite illness, weak health, or many other obstacles achieved their goals. Frequently the amount of work accomplished by such individuals seems humanly impossible — and, of course, it…Continue Reading